Welcome to “A Short Introduction to the Basic Principles of the Open Scene Graph”! This is work-in-progress, but the first few chapters already contain what I consider the most important concepts for anyone learning to use the Open Scene Graph (OSG).

• Chapter 1: The Basics
• Chapter 2: Completing the Triad: StateSets
• Chapter 3: More State — Lights, Textures and Shaders

The following chapters are a rough plan of what this guide will become, if I ever finish it.

• Chapter 4: Render Bins and the Traversals
• Chapter 5: Event Handling (and maybe node callbacks)
• Chapter 6: Node visitors

This is designed as a very introductory guide to OSG, which is an excellent toolkit for the development of 3D software. The focus here is on the concepts. My goal is to teach the main ideas behind OSG, not its details. So, I recommend you to frequently look at the OSG reference documentation while you read this text. I don't assume previous knowledge of OpenGL, but knowing it certainly will make learning OSG much easier. I assume some familiarity with C++, though I have added clarifications on one or two aspects I see people frequently misunderstand.

The source code for the example programs used in this guide is available for download. The archive also contains a 3D model made by myself (appropriately called “ugly_ship.obj”), that you may want to use when testing the programs.

Specifically concerning the Open Scene Graph, I recommend Paul Martz's OpenSceneGraph Quick Start Guide and, again, the OSG reference documentation.

I also recommend you to learn OpenGL, because the Open Scene Graph is very closely related to it. The canonical OpenGL book is the ”OpenGL Programming Guide” (AKA The Red Book). It is not an easy reading, but I cannot really recommend any other OpenGL book, because I didn't read them. Learning The Open GL Shading Language (GLSL) is also useful, and I think that the standard GLSL book (”The Open GL Shading Language”, AKA The Orange Book) is pretty fine.

OSG is open source, so, reading its source code is possible and very educational.

The links below allow you to buy some OpenGL books from Amazon.com. If you buy anything through these links, I'll earn a small commission from Amazon. It doesn't cost more to you, and will make me pretty happy.